There have been predictions since at least 2006, when Pluck shut its RSS reader down that “consumer RSS readers” were a dead market, because, as ReadWriteWeb wrote then, they were “rapidly becoming commodities,” as RSS reading capabilities were integrated into other products like e-mail applications and browsers. And, indeed, a number of consumer-oriented RSS readers, including News Alloy, Rojo, and News Gator, shut down in recent years.

At the same time, traffic to two RSS readers—Bloglines and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader—continued to grow. As recently as mid-2008, Hitwise said that both Bloglines and Google Reader were “growing rapidly” and represented “a huge potential disruption for media companies.” Visits to Bloglines at the time were up 158 percent year-over-year, while traffic to Google Reader was up 267 percent.

But people no longer seem to be abandoning certain readers for others—or for other ways to access those same feeds. Instead, they appear to be abandoning RSS readers as a way to read the news altogether. Hitwise, for instance, tells us that visits to Google Reader are down 27 percent year-over-year, while visits to Bloglines are down 71 percent year-over-year. comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) figures show that traffic to Bloglines has largely stagnated:

Likely to blame is that people are increasingly turning to services like Facebook and Twitter to manage what they read instead instead of RSS readers. As Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins wrote last February, Facebook accounted for about 3.52 percent of all visits to news and media sites. Google Reader’s (shrinking) total back then stood at 0.01 percent.

Indeed, in its announcement, Bloglines similarly blames broader trends for its demise, saying, “As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”
 


Google did not respond to our request for comment, but its recent moves with Google Reader seem to indicate that it too believes that it needs to be more than a straight RSS reader to be successful. Last summer, for instance, it added a slew of features that seemed to position the service more as a sharing social site than as one designed exclusively for tracking the news; users can now “follow” people who publicly share items via Google Reader and also flag items that they “like.”